Sold for: $541,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
LSH Holdings Ltd., Vancouver
Estate of the Artist
By descent within the Harris family to the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Peter Larisey, “A Portfolio of Landscapes by Lawren S. Harris,” National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, no. 23, 1974, a related sketch illustrated page 13
Jeremy Adamson, Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906 - 1930, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978, the 1918 oil sketch entitled Algoma Woods I reproduced page 80 and listed page 223
Peter Larisey, Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Work and Life - An Interpretation, 1993, titled as Algoma and dated 1919, reproduced page 85

EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906 - 1930, January 14 - February 26, 1978, catalogue #58

Warmth radiates from Algoma / LSH 100, a luminous and emotional depiction of a forest interior in northern Ontario, and that warmth imbues the work with a rare quality befitting the special reflective place that it holds in the career of Lawren Harris. Painted around 1950, this large-scale landscape canvas comes from a time when the artist was in the midst of his exploration of Abstract Expressionism, and he had been painting primarily non-objective works for well over a decade. Gone are the cleanly defined volumes of his work from the 1920s, the dramatic stillness of the wilderness stages that echoed with solemnity and pensiveness as light poured over them from external, ethereal planes. Instead, this forest landscape is a constellation of colour, seemingly illuminated from within, and gives a sense of living vibration, as if the light through the woods is dancing on the canvas. The canvas is poetic but not precious, and is infused with not only the passion of the original sketches but also the contemplation and depth that the many years of abstract explorations had given the artist.

In the early 1930s, Harris went through a critical transformation, moving from Toronto to the United States and all but completely leaving behind landscape painting, embarking on a journey to paint “ideas insistently forming which could not be expressed in representational terms.”[1] Harris was an artist who was constantly changing his style and evolving, and the turn to abstraction would take on various forms but would represent his prime focus for the remaining three decades of his career. In discussing this evolution in his letters to Emily Carr in 1936, Harris pondered the future: “Someday I may return to representational painting. I don’t know. Can’t tell. At the present I am engrossed in the abstract way and ideas flow and it looks as though it would take the rest of my days to catch up with them.”[2]

While Harris never returned to a committed focus to landscape sketching (only two plein air sketches are known from all his years in Vancouver, where he settled in 1940 after a few years in the United States), he did eventually begin revisiting his landscape painting and working up sketches from old panels into new canvases. Algoma / LSH 100 is one such work, based on an oil on board sketch titled Wood Interior, Algoma (sold by Sotheby’s Canada in 1987), likely done on one of the famed boxcar trips in 1918 or 1919 along the Algoma Central Railway that solidified the formation of the Group of Seven.

When Harris moved on to abstraction, he gave little thought to the landscape paintings he had left behind, and it was only through the efforts of his wife Bess that many oil on board sketches, such as the one this painting is based on, were rescued from destruction and eventually found their way to Vancouver from the basement of the Studio Building in Toronto. Many of these would remain in Bess’s own collection until she and her husband died. Despite Harris’s focus on abstraction, there are some landscape sketches from the past that evidently rekindled his interest.

The basis for this canvas is one of several key wood interior sketches that represent a transition in the artist’s attentions during the Algoma period, moving beyond the immediate and proximate in the forest, and carrying both the artist and his audience into the glowing light of the unknown beyond. This trajectory, moving towards the expansiveness of the Lake Superior works that would follow, gains more significance upon reflection decades later and provides insight on what drew Harris to this subject. Returning to scenes like this meant returning to the excitement and camaraderie of the trips to Algoma, where he and his fellow artists “worked from early morning until dark, in sun, grey weather, or rain. In the evening by lamp or candlelight each showed the others his day’s work.”[3] This magnificent canvas reveals the artist’s fondness for those important and stimulating times, and it emphasizes the hopefulness that must have defined them, clearly discernible here in the encouraging and inviting glow in the distance, drawing both audience and artist deeper into the exploration of the Canadian landscape.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

1. Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, eds., Lawren Harris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 91.

2. Harris to Emily Carr, May 3, 1936, Emily Carr Papers, MS-2181, box 2, folder 3, BC Archives, Victoria.

3. Lawren Harris, The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Rous & Mann Press, 1964), 20.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars